EMC
Maps the Infoscape
By Joyce Tompsett Becknell
This week EMC announced
Infoscape software and a related Information Management Strategy Service to aid
customers in discovering, classifying, and managing unstructured enterprise
information. With Infoscape, customers can search corporate information in file
systems, classify information by business value, manage retention policies for
compliance, and aid and abet policy-based and automated data migration across
the storage infrastructure. According to EMC,
the software automatically discovers information, assesses its importance, and
executes pre-defined ILM policies. Infoscape leverage investments EMC
has made through its acquisitions of Smarts, Legato, and Documentum, and brings
together information management from several products into one user interface,
a single installation, and a single information management paradigm. The
product includes capabilities such as discovery of files in network shares,
information classification into categories based on file metadata or actual
file content, IT services management, orchestration of file movement between
network shares and storage servers, and reporting and auditing of where
information resides and how it’s being managed. The new EMC
Information Management Strategy Service is a consulting offering designed to
help customers define proper policies, best practices, and procedures to manage
unstructured information across its lifecycle.
Storage used to be a traffic job: focusing on where the data
was parked and which routes it took to get between points. It never really
mattered to storage professionals what the data was as long as it got from
point A to point B in as quick and secure a manner as possible. However, one
consequence of the rise of the Internet has been the swell of unstructured data
within corporations and its growing importance as a business asset. There is a
lot of unstructured information in the corporate network, its content affects
business performance, and no one really knows a lot about it from an
overarching level. Both IT managers and their business counterparts are
concerned about this information and understand its importance; however, the
trouble lies in first finding where all that data is, then classifying it
relative to other data, and then deciding what to needs to be done with it over
time. Business is being spurred to do something sooner rather than later due to
regulation and compliance issues, but the challenge has been finding the
software to make this a manageable process. This is where EMC
believes Infoscape can help. It is designed to tackle exactly these issues. The
important thing for users to remember is that even with the help of software
like Infoscape, much work will be involved in preparing the policies, defining
the rules and setting up the corporate taxonomy. The
consultants may find themselves navigating the slippery slopes of corporate
religion and politics to be at least as complex as navigating the storage
architecture.
By helping customers map the information landscape, EMC
is building the foundations for actually having information lifecycle
management (ILM). Those much used and abused words can have real significance
only if you know what your information is, where it is physically, where it is
in its lifecycle, and how that impacts the storage subsystem that supports it.
The end result, however, should make it worth the effort. Customers will find
that products like Infoscape justify EMC’s
decision to position itself as a company helping customers get the most out of
their information and not just another storage vendor. Additionally, products
like Infoscape make clear what EMC has been
doing acquiring products that might have seemed tangential or orthogonal to its
traditional storage markets. Rather than merging brands or diluting existing
products’ strengths, EMC is taking the
technology within those products and combining them for new solutions. It’s
taking a bit of time to bring new products to market, but we are pleased with
the direction the company is taking.
IBM
Launches Blade Migration Center
By Clay Ryder
IBM has announced the
Blade Migration Center, a program backed by a global team of 300+ consultants
and technologists that targets organizations seeking to migrate to the IBM
BladeCenter. The program is designed to help consolidate, migrate, and
virtualize IT infrastructures on IBM
BladeCenter with both free and fee-based migration services. IBM
will also collaborate with its Business Partners to aid in their data migration
services for clients while providing easy access to key IBM
technologies and industry partners with solutions to address datacenter
re-design and migration, including virtualization, datacenter cooling, and
high-speed networking. Migration consultants will have access to the IBM
Consolidation Discovery and Analysis Tool that recognizes untapped utilization
and hidden servers across clients' networks and helps identify opportunities to
consolidate systems. With PlateSpin PowerConvert, customers will be able to
complete physical and virtual migration projects rapidly by eliminating the
need to re-provision new Windows and Linux servers from scratch. The Cisco
VFrame Server Fabric Virtualization Software helps dynamically change how a
server is provisioned to enable rapid service deployment by creating pools of
reconfigurable, diskless servers, and when combined with IBM's
SAN Volume Controller helps clients manage
heterogeneous storage by combining IBM and
non-IBM storage into a single managed
storage pool. IBM in conjunction with
Innovative Research offers the TileFlow simulation tool to predict the cooling
performance of a data center. With this thermal analysis tool and IBM
PowerExecutive organizations can determine airflow patterns and temperature
distribution in their data center and meter actual power usage and trend data
for any single physical system or group of systems. In addition, IBM
stated that it will also offer existing HP blade clients a $1,000 incentive to
convert to the IBM BladeCenter.
Blades, blades, and blades: we just can’t seem to get enough
of them. In the past several weeks we have witnessed HP’s latest blade
enclosure announcement, Sun’s entry into the market, and now IBM’s
announcement that they will happily trade out any of those systems for one of
Big Blue’s own. Competitive plays are always fun to watch, but this is one that
frankly we have been expecting to see. While Sun has emerged as a player with its own blade system—it has been described by some as the
blade refrigerator due to its considerable size—the focal point of IBM’s
competitive guns is clearly HP, and more specifically its latest
pre-BladeSystem c-Class installed base.
As we noted previously, HP has placed its existing
BladeSystem customers in a quandary given the incompatibility of the p-Class
blades and chassis and that of the newer c-Class. Organizations that currently
hold earlier HP blade gear and are looking to make further investments are
effectively forced to choose between purchasing compatible gear that no longer
represents the announced future path of the vendor, or
breaking compatibility for their new solution. Since compatibility is already
broken, there are fewer barriers to a competitive sell from another vendor, say
IBM. Enter the Blade Migration Center.
Although a $1,000 spiff is not going to radically alter the economics of a
BladeCenter deployment, it may ease the competitive change-out that an
organization would endure, but importantly it illustrates the greater cost that
any organization faces when forced to break compatibility in any IT realm. It
is this much larger cost that may cause organizations to consider whether they
are content in continuing to invest blade solutions that may also face this
similar compatibility break in the future that drives the basis of IBM’s
latest initiatives. Given the complementary technology related to power
consumption and modeling (the very issues that HP has been successfully
exploiting in the marketplace) combined with virtualization-related technology,
it is clear that IBM wants to continue
providing stiff competition in the blade market. Although the impact of a given
acquisition cost for a blade solution is relatively mild, the long-term costs
for organizations based upon their choices related to blade technology could be
considerable. These potential costs are clearly what Big Blue is betting on to
help tilt current HP customer buying proclivities towards IBM.
Data Retention and ISPs
By Susan Dietz
U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has ramped up his efforts
to help pass a law that would force ISPs to retain the records of all of their
subscribers’ Internet habits. Per his intent, the customer logs would be kept
for a year or two instead of the few months or less that they are regularly
retained at present. Reportedly, the amount of time that ISPs retain their
customer’s data varies widely among the providers. The Attorney General claims
that enhanced data retention will enable law enforcement to better utilize
Internet resources to help crack down on those who exploit children. In
addition, many state and local law enforcement agencies are supporting the
measure, as is the Bush administration. The proposed legislation could take one
of two forms. The first is narrow in scope and would only require ISPs to
record for one or two years which IP addresses were used by which persons. The
other form is much broader in scope. It would require ISPs to track email
recipients, who sent instant messages to whom, and the web addresses of the
pages visited by customers.
The United States federal government has already used data
retained from telephone records to uncover journalists’ anonymous sources,
thereby decreasing people’s confidence that any clicktrail data would be kept
for only tracking down the most heinous of child pornographers and terrorists.
There is also the security angle. Data kept is data that is vulnerable to
exploitation. It is conceivable that hackers could discover the clicktrail data
of a group of people for, say, shady marketers or spammers or phishers.
Customer profiling is just too lucrative an area to overlook. Then there is the
wealth of civil lawsuits just waiting to happen. Divorces, contract breaches,
and intellectual property are all areas of civil litigation that would most
likely mushroom with the addition of clicktrail information just waiting to be
used.
Of course, all of this information would have to be kept
somewhere, which could mean a possible boom for storage companies, data
filtering software companies, and others who could aid in the saving and
searching of years of clicktrail information. Data storage technology continues
to take its giant leaps forward, so the market is likely up to the challenge
currently being debated on Capital Hill. While retaining years of clicktrail information
on every person who uses the Internet is a potential goldmine for the data
storage companies, still it is, in our opinion, a massive invasion of privacy.
We as a country must find a balance between catching the bad guys and
protecting citizen’s rights. That balance has mostly been found in other media,
although some would argue that balance is slipping, so we hope that in the rush
to get the bad guy on the Internet, we don’t turn everyone on the Internet into
a bad guy.
